May 24, 2012

New Cryptozoology Book

My newest book should be published around the end of June: Live Pterosaurs in Australia and in Papua New Guinea. This will only be in e-book format, and at low cost, making it easier for Australian book readers to obtain (by download). It will be less detailed than my first nonfiction cryptozoology book, Searching for Ropens, but it will have some sightings and insights absent from the larger book.

Editing will continue over the next few weeks, but the following should be close to what will be found as the first two paragraphs of the second chapter:

The two American soldiers gazed at giant ants that crawled on a log, at mid-day, at the edge of a jungle clearing. The native guide had left them there as he headed for the village they were to visit, just west of Finschhafen, New Guinea. To the guide, ants were nothing strange; to American soldiers in this part of New Guinea in mid-1944, the jungle held little to fear, for the Japanese were gone.

Something came tearing through the tall grass, catching the soldiers' attention: a wild pig, no need to panic . . . but something else became startled: At the far side of the clearing, a creature was running and flapping its wings. All the grass around it was flattened by the blasts of wind from the creature getting airborne. Up over the jungle it flew, out of sight for the moment; but Duane Hodgkinson remained stricken: Extinction itself had just become exterminated---that was no bird.